Natural language understanding in road accident data analysis

Abstract

Road accident records in Britain each comprise two components: coded data in a predefined format, and plain English in free format. This paper describes a natural language understanding system for information retrieval from the latter to verify and extend the former. We adopt the description logic system BACK to achieve a common representation of information from each of the two sources to facilitate comparison. A sub-category grammar is adapted to achieve automatic classification in BACK, and a bidirectional chart parser is adapted to operate with this grammar. This gives good independence between grammar rules, and provides flexibility, expressiveness, and the ability to resolve ambiguities. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd and Civil-Comp Ltd. All rights reserved.